While other smartphone manufactures are moaning about tough economic times, Swedish teleco maker Ericson is making flat pack furniture out of its rivals.

Ericsson said its North American mobile broadband business had stabilized as its posted second-quarter sales and operating profit above market expectations. This was mostly thanks to its networks business however it was also massaging its bottom line with cash from 4G sales in China.

Data traffic growth in telecom operator networks helped sales and profits pick up in its biggest market after a sluggish start of the year, though business activity was still lower there than a year ago, Ericsson said.

Operating profit was $422 million with more than half of its sales coming from its networks unit. The networks unit also made an additional eight per cent in comparison to the first quarter.

Sales at Ericsson, the world number one mobile network equipment maker, were $7.09billion, above a forecast of $6.84 billion. The gross margin was 33.2 percent against a mean forecast of 34.7 percent.

Our guess is that there will be meat ball flinging in the Fjords tonight as Swedes celebrate with their famous dance of the Allen Keys.

Dutch outfit ASML Holding, the world's second largest maker of semiconductor production equipment has managed to flog more than $6.44 billion worth of gear.

The news is important because it sells chip making equipment to fabs so if it is doing well so are they.

ASML's forecasts are closely watched by investors for clues to how key clients Samsung, Intel and TSMC are building the next generation of chips for computers, smartphones, auto and industrial products.

The Dutch outfit reported second-quarter net profits fell 7.2 percent to 369.7 million euros on a 0.6 percent increase in sales to 1.65 billion euros. That was broadly in line with the consensus analyst estimates of 361 million euros, which ranged broadly from 344 million euros to 413 million euros.

It forecast third-quarter sales of between 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion euros, in line with or slightly above what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected.Chief Executive Peter Wennink said was jolly pleased with the news.

"We believe that for the remainder of the year we could see sales levels which are equal to the prognosis for the outlook for Q3, with some upside potential," he said.

You might love your android phone as much as you want but the numbers seems to be working better for Apple.

According to numbers posted by Canaccord Genuity Analyst Company it looks like Apple is getting as much as 92 percent of total smartphone profits. The same report claims that Apple manages to do this with just 20 percent of smartphone market share.

When Apple entered the market in 2007 Nokia RIP had two thirds of the profits. Five years after in 2012 Apple already had half of the profits while Samsung was talking most of the other half -- especially in the high end market.

A year ago, company claimed that Apple had 65 percent of smartphone profits while this number has increased to insane 92 percent today. The same report claims that Apple had 93 percent of profits at the holiday season.

It thinks that the company will do really well this holiday season as there is a rumour that they plan to top 90 million units before the end of the year.

This number should be taken with a grain of salt as these are only predictions and rumours, Still Apple's marketing teams depend on that sort of thing. There is no doubt that Apple is doing well but we just don’t know how accurate this data is. After all it means that the unit cost of the iPhones must have fallen, sales increated and margins become huge.

These are two approaches to sales, chasing after really good margins like Intel or Apple or chasing up after micro margins.

The chaps that go after micro margins are making up for it with high sales which means they have to sell much more to make up for the small margins. Intel and Apple make the most of the device price (CPU for Intel, iPhone for Apple) which results that even with smaller number of devices sold, they still make most of the profits.

Apple got so under people's skin that they will blindly buy any future phone from the company without much hesitation. It bothers us is that phone like iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S6 have become too expensive and that the Far East competition has proven that you can have 90 percent of the experience for half of that price.

Lenovo posted a 30 percent rise in quarterly net profit, beating the forecasts of the fortune tellers and readers of entrails in Wall Street.

The results were not all good news. Lenovo had its slowest growth in the last year mainly due to lackluster demand in some emerging markets and North America.

But that is really a tribute to how fast Lenovo has been growing lately. The ThinkPad maker has been advancing on the global PC stage due to aggressive pricing, overseas acquisitions and a fast-growing home market.

Lenovo said in a statement that although challenges to worldwide PC demand remain largely due to weakening economic condition, Lenovo remains both optimistic about the future of the PC market and committed to innovation. Lenovo posted a net profit of $141.4 million for its April-June first quarter, up from $108.8 million from a year earlier.

The net profit growth was the slowest since the third quarter of fiscal 2010/2011, when the pace was about 25 percent. The result was better than an average forecast of $131.2 million of Wall Street analysts.

Lenovo's profit margin has been lagging those of rivals such as Dell. Its gross profit margin was down 0.5 percentage point in the first quarter from 12.5 percent a year earlier due to price competition in emerging markets and China.

According to a number of sources, the ugly truth behind the sale of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) license to Electronic Arts is that THQ was never able to break even with the franchise. This revolution is confirmed by industry guru Michael Pachter from Wedbush. When all the numbers are added up, it would seem that this is correct.

While the news of the UFC video game license moving to EA was big news, it isn’t a surprise, when you consider that the third UFC title released by THQ needed to reach the 2 million mark in sales just to break even. UFC Undisputed 3 has apparently only sold about 1.4 million copies, which is much less than the 2 million breakeven point.

It will be interesting to see how much more successful EA is with the UFC license and if it will be able to turn it into a yearly sports franchise or it will alternate years with Fight Night as EA’s original MMA title was initially tapped to do. Our sources tell us that a lot it in flux with EA and the UFC license and they are still in the process of making decision on how best to proceed, but sources continue to tell us that we should not expect to see a UFC title from EA till at least 2013 and it might be 2014 if EA elects to skip the platforms of this generation and instead focus on a release for the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4, both of which are now expected in 2014.

Good news from Japan indicates that Square Enix had a pretty banner fiscal 2012 when compared with last fiscal year. Unlike fiscal 2011, which saw the publisher take a loss of $150 million, the publisher has turned things around with a $76 million dollar profit for fiscal 2012.

Square Enix’s strong results were due in part to strong sales of both Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, as both titles sold very well. In addition, the mobile Final fantasy Brigade contributed significant revenue with over two million registered users.

If there was a dark spot at all in the news from Square Enix, it had to be confirmation that the new re-imagined Tomb Raider title scheduled to be released this holiday season is being push back until first quarter 2013.

Square Enix said that developer Crystal Dynamics needs more time to deliver the very highest quality game; and we also hear that with the holiday release schedule getting crowded, the extra time could allow the game to better stand out in a less crowded release time. Square Enix is hopeful that the decision will lead to more sales in the long term.

Finding ways to prostitute the Angry Birds in a number of licensed merchandise deals has been a big money maker for Rovio; it has become so much so that this accounted for up to 30% of the company’s 2011 income for the fiscal year.

Rovio’s consumer products business, which handles the merchandising and licensing, has over 200 licensing partners that are making a number of products. The Angry Birds appear on everything from T-Shirts to calendars and just about everything in between. The success of the licensing of the Angry Birds is quite amazing; and the licensing is an extension of its almost 650 million downloads across all of the platforms that the Angry Birds appear on.

Rovio’s success has inspired a number of other software publishers to look harder at merchandise licensing to help generate additional revenue for its most successful franchises. As we can see by Rovio’s success, it can be a game changer that adds considerably to the bottom line.

LG Electronics’ handset division has ended a six-quarter long streak of bad luck and reported profit for Q4 of 2011.

LG reported Q4 operating profit of $20.5 million, which is dramatically lower than forecasted. Its handset division’s operating profit stands at 9.9 billion won, which amounts to US$8,800,000. While the amount may not seem significant, the fact that the division lost close to a billion dollars since Q2 2010 will put things in perspective.

It is said that the company rode on the success of Optimus LTE. Indeed, the phone has turned out to be somewhat of a golden goose and LG has sold 1 million units since it hit the market in October.

Samsung is set to report a robust quarterly profit rise on Friday, starting the year on an upbeat note aided by sales of smartphones. Samsung is now the world's top smartphone maker in the third quarter, is continuing to give Apple a good kicking with sleek designs and a rich product line-up.

Its handset division is now Samsung's biggest earnings generator, raking in record profits. The company appears to be dealing with a profit squeeze from its memory chips with new revenue sources such as mobile processing chips and high-end OLED displays.

The world's biggest technology firm by revenue is likely to report $4.1 billion in October-December analyts think. That would be its best profit since the third quarter of 2010, and up 57 percent from a year ago and 11 percent from the preceding quarter.

In 2012, Samsung is likely to report a 28 percent rise in operating profit with a 12 percent gain in revenue, according to analysts.

Chimei Innolux, the largest producer of its kind in Taiwan, reported combined revenue drop of 13.5 percent during March, and shipped 5.3 per cent less large-sized display panels and 29.55 million units of small and 21.5 per cent medium-sized models. AU Optronics is the second-largest display panel producer on the island, posted a drop of 7.7 per cent in its combined revenue for April.

Chunghwa Picture Tubes shrank 4.9 per cent from March or 21.4 per cent from last April. The company’s TFT (thin-film transistor) business unit also posted a five per cent monthly drop in combined revenue for April.

The only one making any cash is HannStar Display which saw a 10.4 per cent monthly growth in its combined revenue during the month. Analysts think that Taiwanese display panel makers are likely to turn around starting in June, when prices of the products are expected to bottom out. So now is probably a good time to buy.